Post on 30-Mar-2023
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of PrintAuthor(s): Louise M. BishopSource: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 336-363Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27712660 .
Accessed: 13/04/2015 10:32
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof English and Germanic Philology.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print
Louise M. Bishop, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon
Even in the fifteenth century, Chaucer was seen by his countrymen as the
preeminent English poet, the father, as Dryden was to call him in 1700, of
English poetry.1 Despite general agreement in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries about Chaucer's poetic preeminence, however, Thomas Speght's
edition of Chaucer's Works (1598, STC 5077, 5078, 5079; 1602, STC 5080,
5081)2 adds elaborate textual apparatus?illustrated frontispieces, life
i. Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval
England (University Park, PA: Penn State Univ. Press, 2001), points out that "in the early fifteenth century" the father metaphor "was actually used by only one poet, Thomas Hoc
cleve" (p. 108): it is not used by Lydgate. In print the metaphor appears early with William
Caxton in 1477, so that A. C. Spearing's claim that "the fatherhood of Chaucer was in effect
the constitutive idea of the English poetic tradition" still has purchase {Medieval to Renaissance
in English Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985], p. 92, quoted in Knapp, p. 108, n. 5). In his influential book, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval
England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), especially Chapter 5, "At Chaucer's Tomb:
Laureation and Paternity in Caxton's Criticism," pp. 147-75, Seth Lerer argues that print and editors efface Chaucer's fatherhood in favor of laureation to emphasize the role of an
editor, rather than the (dead) poet, in the production of books by humanist editors. This
essay qualifies that claim for the sixteenth century, arguing that the trope of living father
Chaucer continues to appear in print to counteract print's commodified lifelessness and,
especially in the last folio editions of his Works, to realign Chaucer's forced alliance with
Tudor politics. 2. Alice Miskimin, "The 1598 Folio of Speght," in The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 250-55, and Derek Pearsall, "Thomas Speght, c. 1550-?" in
Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books,
1984), pp. 71-92. See also Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic
Text, 1400?1602, ed. Thomas Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State Univ.
Press, 1999); Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2001); and Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 2002).
For the purposes of this essay, I have consulted two early editions of Chaucer, both owned
by the special collections department of the Knight Library, University of Oregon: PR 1850 1561, a second impression of the John Stow edition of 1561 of Chaucer's Works, STC 5076;
and PR 1850 1687, a 1687 edition of John Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer's Works, C3736. In his 1602 edition (STC 5080, 5081 ), Speght added some material to his 1598 edition (STC
5077, 5078, 5079): see Pearsall, "Thomas Speght," pp. 83-90, and also Eleanor Prescott
Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 125-27. The 1687 edition reprints Speght's 1602 edition with some twenty-two lines added to the ends of The Cook's Tale and The Squire's Tale along with an "Advertisement" by "J. H."
asserting the volume's quality, according to Pearsall, "Thomas Speght, c. 1550-?" p. 91, and
Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, pp. 127-29. I thank special collections for their courtesy.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology?July ? 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 337
histories and genealogies, epistles and dedicatory poems?that insist on
Chaucer's literary value in a particular way: they
use the tropes of Chau
cer as father and as living presence to affirm Chaucer's literary worth.
These apparatus?or peritexts, to borrow Gerard Genette's term3?invoke
Chaucer's living voice through dialogues and letters; their images picture him as if alive and situate his fatherhood, as well as his poetry, in the midst
of Tudor politics. Many peritexts are new to Speght's editions; others carry over from his editorial predecessors William Thynne (1532, STC 5068) and John Stow (1561, STC 5075, 5076). What prompts this expression of Chaucer as father and as living presence?
Seth Lerer has argued that a Chaucer made into (dead) artifact char
acterizes print editions of the poet's works, such as Caxton's from the
fifteenth century; James Simpson uses Lerer's argument
to propose two
tropes, "remembered presence" and "philological absence," that control
Chaucer's reception between 1400 and 1550.4 I counter that Chaucer's
editors and literary progeny throughout the sixteenth century make father
Chaucer live to answer printed books' loss of "aura," as Walter Benjamin
would term it.5 Benjamin's word "aura" treats film art and its attempts
to recreate stage presence, but books and reading also involve presence
and absence. A living father Chaucer participates in the "identifiable sys temic links between texts, printed books, reading, mentalities, and wider
consequences" that William St. Clair notes in his recent analysis of print
3- Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Threshholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). As Richard Macksey explains in the foreword, paratexts
"compris[e] those liminal devices and conventions, both within the book (peritext) and
outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the reader: titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes, epilogues, afterwords . . . the
elements in the public and private history of the book" (p. xviii). Peritext includes "such
elements as the title or the preface and sometimes elements inserted into the interstices of
the text, such as chapter titles or certain notes" (p. 5). My argument about folio editions of
Chaucer concerns dedications, a title page, an illustration, and poetry addressed to readers,
hence "peritexts." Paratexts as advertisements for authors and booksellers and their effects
on the idea of an author have been treated for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French texts
by Cynthia Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). 4. James Simpson, "Chaucer's Presence and Absence 1400-1550," in The Cambridge Com
panion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003),
pp. 251-69. Relying on Lerer, Simpson delineates changes in the "literary system" (p. 261 )
that made Chaucer's texts into "archeological remains" (p. 251): "By the 1520s Chaucer
has, then, definitely gone, leaving only textual remains" (p. 267). As I hope to show, the
trope of living father Chaucer modifies Simpson's claims.
5. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Il
luminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968),
pp. 219-53: "aura is tied to presence" and "The aura which, on the stage, emanates from
Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor" (p. 231). I thank
my colleague Kathleen Karlyn for pointing me to Benjamin's essay.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
338 Bishop
culture.6 Books are, by the sixteenth century, part of "a new scheme of
values concerning inanimate objects":
by the end of the 16th century, an opposition between the material world
and the realm of language and ideas that had been an extreme and radical
position . . . two hundred years earlier had moved to the very heart of Eng
lish cultural life.7
Images of and words about a living poet return materiality to language to
reinvest lifeless print with material being's "aura." The trope of Chaucer's
living fatherhood apparent in both word and image in sixteenth-century
printed books animates Chaucer's presence. Benjamin's concept of "aura"
lets us understand the efforts printed books, especially print editions of
Chaucer, make to revive him and animate his living presence.
Living father Chaucer, revived in books as a national figure to serve
the dynastic needs of Henry VIII and "staged" in a bookish fashion dur
ing Elizabeth's reign, answers the isolation, foreignness, and alienation
that mechanical reproduction cannot avoid. A close look at the efforts of
Chaucer's various editors and sixteenth-century authors to present Chaucer
as living and as father shows the ways these two tropes attempt to invest
print with "presence" in time and space in order to counter its depreciation as
commodity. Moreover, near the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, in an
edition overloaded with multiple peritexts, John Speed's pictorial figura tion of Chaucer as father and living presence published in Speght's edition
of "The workes of our an tient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer,
newly printed" ( 1598) not only counters print's dead, commodified nature
but lets us read one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as an especially poignant
antiauthoritarian plea. Through a long-standing identity of the poet with
The Tale of Melibee, a living father Chaucer confronts autocratic rulership in anticipation of successive change?of rulers, readers, and books.
To support these claims I will first note the tropes of Chaucer's father
6. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2004): printed books fit "governing economic and intellectual property structures, financ
ing, manufacturing, prices, access, and actual reading" (p. 439) which differ from those of
manuscript culture. Other works on the idea of print include Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Print
Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1983); and Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance
Preface (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994). On medieval ideas of authorship, see The Idea
of the Vernacular, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans
(University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 3-19, esp. "The Idea of an Author" (pp. 4-8) and "Textual Instability, Memory, and Vernacular Variance" (pp. 10-12).
7. John Hines, Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2004), p. 138. Both Hines and St. Clair note that, while relations between print and manu
script remain fluid at the beginning of the sixteenth century, lines harden during the six teenth century.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 339
hood and living presence in manuscripts and printed books, especially in
two engravings included in editions of Chaucer's Works from the second
half of the sixteenth century. After elaborating on the implications of the
father/living presence trope for Chaucer's readers, I conclude with an
against-the-grain reading of Chaucer's Tale of Melibee. This prose text, far
from being a "retreat from poetry into staid secure prose,"8 exploits the
tropes of living father Chaucer, along with a nascent link between rhetoric
and drama,9 to body forth a critique of authoritarianism, even though
literary redemption remains only a fond hope as the Tudor lineage, but
not authoritarian regulation, meets its extinction.
I
Fifteenth-century manuscripts attest that Chaucer's earliest acolytes used
a number of expressions to denote Chaucer's preeminence
as English
poet, with "master" the special favorite.10 Thomas Hoccleve is the first to
use the epithet "father" for Chaucer. In The Regement of Princes (1412), Hoccleve not only laments Chaucer's death, but imagines Chaucer speak
ing to him:
"Hoccleue, sone?" "I-wis, fadir, f>at same."
"Sone, I haue herd, or this, men speke of pe" . . .
"O maister deere, and fadir reuerent!
Mi maister Chaucer, flour of eloquence, Mirour of fructuous entendement,
O, vniuersel fadir in science! . . .
Mi dere maistir?god his soule quyte!? And fadir, Chaucer, fayne wolde han me taght; But I was dul, and lerned lite of naght."
8. Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 196. Lerer details the Henrician court's
manuscript culture, primarily coterie works that, in the case of Henry's love letters to Anne
Boleyn, achieve an un-looked-for currency.
9. Hines, Voices in the Past, explains that "drama as a means of training and education . . .
was a practical complement to the rhetorical training in dialectics through which medieval
students had to develop their argumentative and analytical skills . . . the history of dramatic
production in England for the most of the 16th century is consequently strongly marked
by records of theatrical performances in schools . . . and at colleges" (p. 144). 10. Lydgate begins his ca. 1409 "Commendacioun of Chaucer" with "And eke my master
Chauceris nowe is graue / The noble rethor Poete of breteine"; he repeats the epithet "master" for Chaucer in virtually every other English poem he wrote. In 1448 John Metham
calls Chaucer "My mastyr Chauncerys"; George Ashby (ca. 1470) calls Gower, Chaucer, and
Lydgate "masters"; Henry Scogan begins a ca. 1407 poem with "My maister Chaucier." See
Caroline Spurgeon, 500 Years of Chaucer Criticism, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1925), followed by Jackson Campbell Boswell and Sylvia Wallace Holton, Chaucer's Fame in
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
340 Bishop
Hoccleve blends "master" with "father," then repeats "master" twice more
in the poem, while also at one point calling Chaucer "firste fyndere of our
faire langage." Indeed, TheRegement of Princes uses an array of tropes?mas
ter, father, originator?to certify Chaucer's preeminence, while the text's
dialogue form?Chaucer speaks to Hoccleve?revivifies the dead poet.
Three manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regement add Chaucer's image to Chau
cer's voice.11 In London, British Library MS Harley 4866, a picture of the
poet appears next to the following verses:
AljDogh his lyfe be queynt, pe resemblaunce
Of him \\ap in me so fressh lyflynesse
f>at, to putte othir men in remembraunce
Of his persone, I haue heere his lyknesse Do make, to p'xs, ende in sothfastnesse,
{)at \>e\ {>at haue of him lest fought & mynde, By J)is peynture may ageyn him fynde.12
The manuscript's drawing of Chaucer points its finger at the word "like
ness" while the lines credit Hoccleve's living memory for the image's lin
eaments. Chaucer's pointing finger gently testifies to the image's verisi
England: STC Chauceriana, 1475-1640 (New York: Modern Language Association, 2004). Boswell and Holton treat printed materials only, not manuscripts, but they have "checked
every edition of every book to see if a reference to Chaucer is present and, if it is present, whether it has changed in any way" (p. xii). For the purposes of this paper, all references to manuscript material (pre-1475) come from Spurgeon. References to printed materials come from Boswell and Holton. On occasion, I have used the database Early English Books
Online, http://o-eebo.chadwyck.com.janus, for references: footnotes indicate these citations.
Both Spurgeon and Boswell and Holton arrange their entries chronologically. The reader
may thus refer to either edition as appropriate by means of the year cited. Additional refer ences to print sources other than Boswell and Holton, or manuscript sources not listed in
Spurgeon, are cited in footnotes. 11. London, British Library MS Harley 4866; Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Li
brary MS 1083/10; and BL MS Royal 17 D.vi; see Derek Pearsall, "The Chaucer Portraits,"
Appendix 1 in The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 285-305. See also Michael Seymour, "Manuscript Portraits of Chaucer and Hoccleve,"
Burlington Magazine, 124, no. 955 (October 1982), 618-23. Pearsall considers the Rosen
bach portrait an eighteenth-century addition to the manuscript (p. 291). Trigg, Congenial Souls, pp. 21-28, evaluates the power of voice for the "imagined community" of Chaucer's readers and scholars from the Renaissance to the late 1990s. While I differ from Trigg's assessment of Chaucer's living voice, her book has influenced my thinking about Chaucer's
"lively" appearance and his voice. 12. The image is reproduced in Seymour, "Manuscript Portraits," p. 619; Pearsall, Life,
p. 286; M. H. Spielmann, The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Kegan Paul, 1900), p. 7; and as a line drawing in Spurgeon, Chaucer Criticism, I, 22. Trigg, Congenial Souls, treats the
image of Chaucer in tandem with the "famous picture of Chaucer" pointing to his name
in the rubric of the Ellesmere Tale of Melibee and calls it a "narrating presence" (p. 50). See also Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 104-22, and Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer's
English (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 12, on the word "finder" that exercises an "Hocclevian arc toward the infinite" to escape the confines of language.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 341
militude, but it also, in indicating the word "likeness," recalls the image's
representational nature. Pictures may gesture at life, but at the same time
they remain pictures. Still, so self-conscious an image
as Hoccleve's of Chau
cer, joining picture and text, indicates the protean relationship between
"figured objects and people" that Hoccleve uses: he expects his readers'
thoughts and minds will, through this "peynture," "ageyn . . .
fynde" Chau
cer, "fyndere" of the English language.13 While Hoccleve's image situates the reader as Hoccleve's companion,
hoping that those who have forgotten Chaucer's appearance will now
remember him, most readers have to do so without the aid of a "like
ness": just three of the forty or so manuscripts of The Regement include
a Chaucer image, and the image in one of those?Philadelphia, Rosen
bach MS 1083?was drawn in the eighteenth century. Still, "likeness"
of an author is an idea new to this time14 and Chaucer was not alone in
having his image painted in manuscripts. Two full-length portraits, in
Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 307 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 290, portray the senex amans of the Confessio Amantis?-John Gower?without the kind of name attribution or pun on "likeness" found
in the Hoccleve manuscript's illustration of Chaucer.15 But Gower's like
ness, as well as Chaucer's and his "child" Hoccleve's, appears in several
initials in the deluxe Bedford Psalter (ca. 1410), and in one, "an explicit label on the background of the portrait
. . . identifies the elderly, bald
ing and bearded" Gower.16 Of the Psalter's three images of Hoccleve and
three of Chaucer, none has any identification like Gower's. However, the
drawings of Chaucer are thought
to come from the same hand that drew
his portrait in Harley 4866, the Regement of Princes manuscript already discussed. Portraiture begins
to denote authors for readers in the context
of late medieval manuscripts.
13- For an analysis central to my thinking about the living resonance of images, see David
Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999): "image [is] more
than it seems" (p. xxiv) and "figured objects and people" are always "disrupting natural law"
(p. 43). See also Maidie Hilmo, Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts
(Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004): the medieval audience regards "visual details as a
signifying system for both literal truth ('what each looks like') and symbolic truth ('what
each stands for' or 'figures')" (p. 18), distinct from the Renaissance's "primary referent,"
which is "terrestial reality" (p. 10).
14. Sylvia Wright, "The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer
and Hoccleve," British Library Journal, 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1992), 190-201, sees the first com
memorations of Dante and Petrarch ca. 1375 as the genesis of author portraits (p. 190).
15. Derek Pearsall, "The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower's Works," in The Companion to Gower, ed. Si?n Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), points out that the "unusual and
seemingly rather inappropriate choice" of an old man with forked beard shows that "The
artist, or the supervisor who gave him his instructions, has chosen the literal truth rather
than the literary subterfuge" (p. 89). 16. See images in Wright, "Author-Portraits"; for the explicit label, p. 192.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
342 Bishop
Admittedly, manuscript images are limited in their cultural purchase to a rather minimal, though influential, audience. But manuscripts
are
not the exclusive purveyors of Chaucer's and Gower's images. Gower's
chantry and tomb in the chapel of John the Baptist in St. Mary Overie, Southwark, may have been designed
as early
as the last years of Gower's
life; he died in 1408.17 Gower's chantry survived the religious tumult of the sixteenth century, so that antiquarian John Stow, who edited a 1561 folio edition of Chaucer, was able to describe the effigy and chantry in his 1598 Survey of London:
lohn Gower Esquier, a famous Poet, was then an especiall benefactor to that
worke, and was there buried on the North side of the said church, in the
chappie of S. lohn, where he founded a chauntrie, he lieth vnder a tombe of
stone, with his image also of stone ouer him: the haire of his head aburne,
long to his sholders, but curling vp, and a small forked beard, on his head a
chaplet, like a coronet of foure Roses, an habite of purple, demasked downe
to his feet, a collar of Esses, gold about his necke, vnder his head the likenes of
three bookes, which he compiled. The first named Speculum Meditantis, writ ten in French: The second Vox clamantis penned in Latine: the third Confessio amantis written in English, and this last is printed, vox clamantis with his Cr?nica
tripartita, and other both in latine and French neuer printed, I haue and
doe possesse, but speculum meditantis I neuer saw, though heard thereof to be in Kent: beside on the wall where he lyeth, there was
painted three virgins crowned, one of which was named Charity, holding this deuise.18
Chaucer too had a public tomb, and ca. 1556, following Nicholas Brigham's enhancement, worshippers in Westminster Abbey could have seen a por trait of Chaucer between the sepulchre's arches.19 Speght's 1598 edition
(STC 5077) provides the earliest written record of it, and Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum ( 1652) provides the earliest image.20 The
figure holds a rosary in his left hand, a mark perhaps of an attempt to reclaim Chaucer for Roman Catholicism during the reign of Queen Mary.
While Westminster worshippers could see Chaucer's image in the second half of the sixteenth century, the upper crust could see portraits of the author in fine houses. Some six portrait panels survive from the sixteenth
century, but no such tradition immortalizes Gower. Chaucer's image had
special currency in sixteenth-century England.
17-John Hines, Nathalie Cohen, and Simon Roffey, "Iohannes Gower, Armiger, Poeta: Records and Memorials of His Life and Death," in A Companion to Gower, pp. 23-41, with photograph of the tomb (p. 37).
18. A Survey of London by John Stoiu Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), I, 57.
19. Joseph A. Dane, Who is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 10-32.
20. See Dane, Who is Buried, p. 13, for Speght's description, with an image from the 1602 edition (STC 5080), and Pearsall, Life, p. 296, for an image of Ashmole's engraving.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 343
Chaucer and Gower both see print in deluxe folio editions in 1532.21 Unlike the tradition of Chaucer folios, the 1532 edition of Gower's Con
fessio Amantis (STC 12143)?a single work, unlike a "complete works"
edition like Chaucer's, and printed by Thomas Berthelet, business part ner with Chaucer's printer Thomas Godfray?is reprinted once, in 1554
(STC 12144), before it vanishes from continued impression. The Confessio Amantis sees deluxe folio again only in the nineteenth century. Chaucer's
complete works, however, see continual folio printing throughout the
sixteenth century, but his readers have to wait until 1598 for his "like
ness," as in the Hoccleve manuscript, the Bedford Psalter, or his tomb, to
emerge in print. Printed portrait or no, the "father" epithet applied to Chaucer, first
used in manuscript, follows Chaucer into print. In his 1477 Book ofCurtesye (STC 3303) William Caxton addresses Chaucer "O fader and founder of
ornate eloquence" and repeats himself in a 1478 epilogue to the Consola
tion of Philosophy, calling Chaucer "the worshipful fader 8c first foundeur
8c embelissher of ornate eloquence in our englissh."
The epithet endures
another century: in 1575, George Gascoigne uses it in his "Certayne Notes
of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English," part of
The posies of George Gascoigne esquire (STC 11637): "also our father Chaucer
hath used the same libertie in feete and measures that the Latinists do
use." In the same text Gascoigne, like Hoccleve, combines "master" and
"father" in one phrase
to describe Chaucer's particular verse form, "rid
ing rhyme": "that is suche as our Mayster and Father Chaucer vsed in his
Canterburie tales, and in diuers other delectable and light enterprises." In contrast, the somewhat later Cobler of Caunterburie (1590, STC 4579), a
collection of stories told by a Thames boating party to imitate Chaucer's
pilgrimage narrative, adds "old" to the father epithet, with no reference to
"master," making the work's most frequent epithet
"old Father Chaucer."22
This ostensibly endearing phrase simultaneously compliments the poet and relegates him to the past. The author's admission that "Syr Jeffrey Chauceris so hie aboue my reach, that I take Noli altum sapere, for a
warning,
and onely looke at him with honour and reuerence" follows Hoccleve's
desire to put his father Chaucer's "likeness" on the page tojog his reader's
21. James E. Blodgett, "William Thynne," in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul
G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books), pp. 35-52; Echard, Companion to Gower, pp.
115-35, esP- PP- 116?17. See also Forni, Counterfeit Canon, pp. 45-54. 22. The Cobler of Caunterburie and Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, ed. Geoffrey Creigh and
Jane Belfield (Leiden: Brill, 1987); John Pitcher, "Literature, the Playhouse and the Public,"
in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557-1695, ed.John Barnard and D. F.
McKenzie with the assistance of Maureen Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), p.
367. Creigh and Belfield mention the possibility that the text is the work of Robert Greene
(pp. 9-10).
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
344 Bishop
memory and encourage his friendship: after hearing Chaucer's voice,
Hoccleve provides his reader Chaucer's likeness. The Coblers narrator also
uses voice to match his reverential gaze at Father Chaucer: he asks the
reader, "What say you to old father Chaucer?" The father trope in manu
script and print makes Chaucer genial and approachable, his reader's
eyes reaching him, his fatherhood folded into his voice and his reader's.
William Thynne's 1532 folio edition of Chaucer's collected Workes is not
the first folio of Chaucer printed: in 1526 Richard Pynson prints a folio
Canterbury Tales (STC 5086). But Thynne's edition, a complete Works, cre
ates Chaucer as "champion of the King [Henry VIII] against the conflict
ing claims of Church and nobility."23 Chaucer's earliest printer, William
Caxton, veteran of the War of the Roses, had already planted Chaucer into
the "Tudor Myth" for Henry VIII's father, Henry VII, who was "conspicu ously weak in his ancestral connections."24 Without mentioning Henry
VII by name, Caxton includes Chaucer among the "clerkes, poetes, and
historiographs" whose "many noble bokes of wysedome of the lyues, pas sions, & myracles of holy sayntes of historyes, of noble and famous Actes and faittes, And of the cronycles sith the begynning of the creaci?n of the
world" have contributed to "thys Royame."25 By 1532, "the royal patron
age of [Thynne's edition of Chaucer] was one of the many autocratic,
centralizing gestures of Henry's regime, and was intended to augment
Henry's own
glory and strength."26 Even the gesture of a Chaucer edition,
centralizing all of Chaucer in one book?a fate Gower escapes?imitates the authoritarianism of Tudor hegemony, providing "textual correlatives
of bureaucratic centralization."27
Chaucer may seem a natural for immersion in "The Tudor Myth," be
23-John Watkins, "'Wrastling for This World': Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of
Chaucer," in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1998), p. 23.
24. E. M. W. Tillyard, Some Mythical Elements in English Literature (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1961), p. 47. Tillyard includes among the myth's popularizers Edmund Spenser, William Warner, Michael Drayton, John Dee, and Edward Hall (p. 53). To Tillyard's list of Tudor apologists, add John Stow, editor of the 1561 Chaucer edition, whose Chronicles
of England (1580) "present in chronicle form the legend of England as a people chosen
by God for His own purposes"; Rosemary O'Day, The Longman Companion to The Tudor Age (London: Longman, 1995), p. 79. Tillyard's handy title cannot comprise all the subtleties of
Tudor rule: see David Loades, Power in Tudor England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), for the shape of the Tudors' "personal monarchy," and on print his Politics, Censorship and the English Reformation (London: Pinter, 1991); also King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature
and Art in the Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989). 25. W.J. B. Crotch, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, EETS o.s. 176 (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1928), pp. 90-91. 26. Theresa M. Krier, "Introduction," in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Krier,
p. 10.
27. Watkins, "'Wrastling for This World,'" p. 24.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 345
cause he lived during its inception. Chaucer's king was Richard II, whose
deposition fomented the York-Lancaster fracas now known as the War of
the Roses that eventually led to Henry Tudor's power grab in 1485. The
Tudor era, begun with Henry Tudor's ascension as Henry VII, officially concludes with Elizabeth's death in 1603. But Chaucer's biography did
not automatically identify him with the Tudors nor match his attitudes
with their policies. "Antiquarian enterprises like Thynne's often had a dis
tinctly counter-monarchical implication, the establishment of an English national identity apart from the Crown": Chaucer was alternately viewed as
a "right Wicleuian" and abettor of Protestant polemics or as sympathetic with Henry VIII's disaffected nobility.28 Chaucer's editors work hard to
identify him with the Tudor cause. Folio editions of Chaucer, dedicated
repeatedly to Henry VIII even after his demise, imbricate the poet with
the Tudors and their spin on England's national narrative:29 Thynne's dedication to Henry VIII, in which he asserts that Chaucer's Workes will
add to the "laude and honour of this your noble realme," continues to
be printed as peritext in every sixteenth-century folio edition, both the
reprints of Thynne and the new editions of John Stow ( 1561 ) and Thomas
Speght (1598 and 1602).30 Thynne's edition, produced during a year of parliamentary, royal, and clerical maneuvering that included a pro
rogued parliament and Thomas More's resignation
as chancellor, presages
Henry's Act of Supremacy (1534) and exemplifies the complicated and
unsteady alliances publishers and printers make with (dead) poets, living monarchs, and authoritarian national politics.31
"Father" Chaucer in folio
editions affects "father Chaucer" for Gascoigne and the Cobler author:
the poet is both remote and reachable, visible and audible in a readerly fashion begun with Hoccleve, now touched with Chaucer's immersion in
Tudor authoritarianism. Tudor politics and Chaucer's fatherhood work
28. Watkins, "'Wrastling for This World,'" pp. 23-25.
29. "Thynne's [1532] editions perhaps served Henrician dynastic and nationalistic im
peratives by establishing an English literary heritage . . . Chaucer's eloquence was valued
for its symbolic capital": Forni, "Thynne and Henrician Nationalism," Counterfeit Canon, p.
50.
30. On Thynne's 1542 and 1550 editions, see Martha W. Driver, "A False Imprint in
Chaucer's Works: Protestant Printers in London (and Zurich?)," Trivium,'*,! (1999), 131-54, who argues that the Thynne reprints were the work of Protestant, even offshore printers; Derek Brewer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume 1, 1385?1837, The Critical Heritage (London: Rout
ledge, repr. 1995), prints much of the Thynne's preface dedicating his edition to Henry
VIII, pp. 87-90. He also mentions the contention that the preface was written by Brian
Tuke. On the Tuke question, see Forni, Chaucerian Apocrypha, p. 30, and Trigg, Congenial
Souls, pp. 128 and 258, n. 41.
31. See Simpson, "Chaucer's Presence," and for a succinct chronology see Sharon L.
Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy Under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1991),
pp. 21-24.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
346 Bishop
in tandem with the identity of family as nation to make Chaucer's readers
into Tudor subjects. The trope of Chaucer as father meshes with Tudor concerns about po
litical legitimacy as it limns their worries about succession and progeny:
Henry VIII's desire for a male heir and his daughter Elizabeth's virgin
queenship are among the family factors that animate Tudor policy, piety, and poetry.32 Although the Tudors are not unique in joining fatherhood
with nation, their success establishing "The Tudor Myth" in print and on
stage derived in part from their concerted efforts to regulate print. Henry VIII's treason legislation of the 1530s required all licensed books to print "cum privilegio regali ad imprimendum solum" on the title page; legisla tion in 1543 that specified penalties and in 1546 that required identity,
although aimed primarily at "theological matter," illustrates the climate in
which Chaucer's publishers worked.33 Tudor legislation of print matches
their innovative and absolutely authoritarian law of attainder, an act of par
liament pushed by Tudor interests that allows execution without trial. The
"steadily increasing efficiency and stringency of censorship" by 1590?the
print year of Cobler?gave "the English government a stronger grip on
the domestic printing industry than any other European monarch."34
In 1575 and 1590, Gascoigne and the Cobler author may have heard
their father Chaucer's voice in William Thynne's 1532 edition. Thynne himself, he tells us, had enjoyed hearing Chaucer: in his dedication to
Henry VIII, he writes of having "taken great delectacyon / as the tymes and
laysers might suffre / to rede and here the bokes of that noble 8c famous
clerke Geffray Chaucer."35 Or perhaps they heard their father Chaucer in a different folio edition: John Stow's 1561 Chaucer's Works is produced in the early years of Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603). Stow's book includes a suggestive image that joins father Chaucer to Tudor genealogy (fig. 1 ). Like Thynne's dedication to Henry VIII printed in later sixteenth-century folio editions, Stow's peritext also appears in a later edition, Speght's of
1598.36 This engraving depicts the lineage of Elizabeth's father Henry VIII: it begins with the family antagonists, Yorks and Lancasters, of the
32. "It can be difficult, if not impossible, however, to draw sharp distinctions among
political, pietistic, and aesthetic endeavors during this age [the Tudor age]": John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography, p. 3.
33. See James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, vol. 2: 1350?1547, The Oxford
English Literary History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 338, n. 48, and "Chaucer's
Presence and Absence," pp. 265-66, for Henry's 1542 legislation that allows "Canterburye tales" and "Chaucers bokes" to continue in print.
34. Loades, Power, p. 122.
35. Francis Thynne's Animadversions upon Speght's first (1598 A.D.) Edition of Chaucers Workes, ed. G. H. Kingsley, revised F. Y. Furnivall, EETS o.s. g (London: Tr?bner, 1865), p. xxiv.
36. Anne Hudson, "John Stow, 1525?-! 605," in Editing Chaucer, ed. Ruggiers, pp. 57-58.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 347
War of the Roses. The illustration mimics a Jesse tree {radixJesse), a picto rial representation of the Virgin Mary's parentage familiar to medieval audiences.37 In a typical version of the Christian icon, Jesse, father of King David, lies at the illustration's bottom. A vine springs from his midsection to initiate the Virgin's genealogy, and this "tree" ascends through King
David to Jesus. In Stow's peritext, monarchs replace saints:38 a
recognizable
Henry VIII supplants?deposes??the Jesus who traditionally tops the im
age. Splitting the traditionally recumbent "Jesse" into two figures?John of Gaunt and Edmund, Duke of York?makes visible the two "houses" of
White and Red Rose central to the Tudor narrative. The ascent of rose
vines on either side of the illustration marks the division between the two
royal houses, their battles the subject of Shakespeare's history plays. The
vines culminate in a rose-enthroned King Henry VIII depicted, unlike
the other royals in the illustration, with all three accouterments of royal office?crown, scepter, sword?as father triumphant.39
In this fashion the
engraving replaces Jesus's family with England's royal lineage, equipped with the implements of authority?and punishment. Its allusion to the
Jesse tree suggests the redemptive quality of the patriarchal Tudor myth and Tudor authoritarianism, but its triumphalism mocks the mercy of
Mary's son.
This peritext functions in Stow's 1561 and Speght's 1598 editions as
title page for The Canterbury Tales: it layers Chaucer with Tudor genealogy. The title "The Caunterburie tales" appears in the center of the woodcut, surrounded by almost exclusively male Yorks and Lancasters. Besides
suggestively linking royal and divine history, the peritext, with its title
"The Caunterburie tales" weaves Chaucer together with English history in a matrix of royal "fatherhood." The image uses print and family to mix
royal, religious, national, and literary meanings together. Henry VIII's
family tree places Chaucer's Canterbury Tales squarely in the center of
royal genealogy and its concerns about legitimate progeny, patriarchal
authority, and political succession. Stow's image encapsulates Queen Elizabeth's bloodline, advertising her merits to
potential suitors while
conveniently eliding, three years into her reign, her dead and barren
siblings. When reprinted in Speght's 1598 edition after hope for Tudor
progeny has failed, Stow's woodcut, as "mediating literary artifact . . .
37- See Arthur Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1934).
38. The Tudor wont to replace saintly images with their own is almost a critical com
monplace. See King, Tudor Royal Iconography, pp. 57-59, and Martha W. Driver, "Mapping Chaucer: John Speed and the Later Portraits," Chaucer Review, 36 (2002), 229-49.
39. The genealogy is, of course, fashioned to support Tudor ideology. Richard II is absent
from the page, and Henry VII looks to be inevitable as monarch.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
348 Bishop
Figure 1. The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer : newly printed with divers addicions, whiche were never in printe before
: with the
siege and destrucci?n of the worthy citee of Thebes, compiled by
John Lydgate, monke ofBerie : as in the table more
plainly dooeth
appere. London: Jhon Kyngston for Jhon Wight, dwellyng in Poules Churchyarde, 1561. Folio 5, recto. By kind per
mission of James Fox, head, special collections, Knight
Library, University of Oregon.
bears the traces of past as well as present social and political conflict."40
The picture's treacherous implications question Tudor fecundity and
Chaucer's relationship to it, and may have contributed to its elimina
tion in 1602 reprints of Speght's edition. No longer does Henry VIII's
genealogy frame father Chaucer: the increasingly fraught succession
40. Watkins, "'Wrastling for This World,'" p. 36.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 349
question encouraged the 1602 printers of Speght's edition to introduce
The Canterbury Tales without this peritext.
II
Besides the trope of "father Chaucer" traceable in both manuscript and
print, another trope?Chaucer as
living author?appears in the sixteenth
century. Thomas Proctor, in A Gorgious gallery of gallant inventions (1578, STC 20402), can only wish "If Chawser yet did live" in order to assure his
audience that, like Proctor, Chaucer too would write verses in praise of
"Mistress D." Samuel Daniel puts the wish for a living Chaucer even more
forcefully. In his Poeticall essayes (1599, STC 6261), he laments the "low
disgrace" of "hy races" that have occurred "Since Chaucer liu'd." While
this one part of Daniel's poem recognizes Chaucer's death, the rest of it
brings Chaucer back to life: "who yet Hues and yet shall, / Though (which I grieue to say) but in his last."41 What sort of hope are they expressing?
Marxist theory provides one way to understand this trope of a living Chaucer. In order to become objects of capital exchange, books as com
modities need to be drained of life, turned into "products that count for
more in social life than the real relations of persons."42 A printed book
does not entirely fit a Marxist idea of commodity: a book is not "a primary
good, such as coal or sugar, whose characteristics remain much the same
however much of it is produced," and booksellers have an interest in
"the fate of their product."43 But printed editions of Chaucer neverthe
less exemplify commodified lifelessness. Print's "deadness" contrasts with
the living nature of manuscripts: practices associated with manuscripts?
scraping, pointing, incising?emphasize their fleshly nature in contrast to
print.44 With word and image produced by hand on the skins of animals,
manuscripts embody the metaphor of "living words." Hoccleve's image
of Chaucer, meant to jog memory, fits the production
of manuscripts,
rather than the reproduction of printed books. Mechanical reproduction
changes books from heirloom to commodity. Print's early years did not inspire censorship: until the 1520s, its me
chanical nature occluded its political potency. Those efforts arise in the
4L Pitcher, "Literature, Playhouse," pp. 361-64, discusses Daniel's work.
42. Terrell Carver, A Marx Dictionary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 81-87, explains fetishism of commodities (quotation at p. 83); Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers, explores the way the printing press in France "led to the objectification, commercialization, and
commodification of the book" (p. 5); see St. Clair, Reading Nation, for modifications.
43. St. Clair, Reading Nation, p. 31.
44. See the editors' "Introduction," in The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese
and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp.
ix-xviii, for a meditation on manuscripts' lividity.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
3 5 o Bishop
1530s and grow in the 1540s. Nor does Elizabeth's official government
censorship begun in 1559 eliminate the seditious print of Shakespeare's
contemporaries, Latin historian William Camden (1551-1623) and poet Michael Drayton (1563-1631).45 Her 1586 Star Chamber decree "con
firmed the powers of the Stationers Company and the privileges of paten tees. Powers of censorship, previously mainly
a matter of self-censorship
within the industry, are
given to the ecclesiastical authorities": as William
St. Clair also notes, "From 1595. [sic] Ecclesiastical censorship tightened."46 Tudor authoritarianism tracks, but cannot contain, the figure of living father Chaucer: his liveliness answers commodification; his fatherhood
puts in perspective the Tudor hegemony's tragic family prospects, barren
like Macbeth's, unable to "stand in posterity"; and his image can challenge
reigning pieties as did his poetry in the hands of some of Henry VIII's
courtiers in the 1530s and 1540s.47
Father Chaucer's voice also sounds in three "protodramatic" dialogue texts that stage Chaucer in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century print.
This small genre of living, speaking Chaucers resembles the dialogue Hoc
cleve works into his R?gentent of Princes and suggests intersections between
literature and the stage before Richard Burbage's 1576 purpose-built theater makes a theatrical idiom concrete.48 William Bullein publishes a tract against the plague, "A Dialogue both pleasaunte and pietifull"
(1564), in which he describes Chaucer preparing to speak of poetry:
Wittie Chaucer satte in a chaire of gold couered with roses, writing prose 8c Rime, accompanied with the spirites of many kynges, knightes and faire
ladies. Whom he pleasauntly besprinkeled with the sweete water of the well,
consecrated unto the Muses, ecleped Aganippe.
After this introduction and description, Chaucer speaks in iambic hex
ameter, asserting in his own voice "no buriall hurteth holie men, though
beastes them deuour, / Nor riche graue preuaileth the wicked for all
yearthly power." A living Chaucer here answers any wish to put him in
his grave in a fashion more powerful than a
monologue. Such dialogues
presage Elizabethan theatrical energy. A later sixteenth-century tract also includes this sort of speaking Chau
cer: Greenes Vision: written at the instant of his death ( 1592, STC 12 261 ) .49 A
45- Watkins, "'Wrastling for This World,'" p. 23.
46. St. Clair, Reading Nation, Appendix 2, p. 481. 47. Watkins, "'Wrastling for This World,'" p. 25.
48. Pitcher, "Literature, Playhouse," esp. p. 351, and Hines, Voices in the Past, esp. pp. 143-44.
49. See Helen Cooper, "'This Worthy Olde Writer': Pericles and Other Gowers, 1592-1640," in A Companion to Gower, ed. Si?n Echard, pp. 110-13, esp. 100-4. On Greenes Vision and
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 351
dream vision in prose and poetry, it treats a colloquy on literaryjudgment
ostensibly dreamed by Robert Greene, prolific Elizabethan dramatist and
writer. The vision recounts Chaucer, Gower, and Greene arguing about the
morality of their several works as well as the meaning of literature more
generally. While scholarly opinion divides on whether Greene himself wrote the work, his dramatic ambiance pervades it. After Greene states
his case regarding the fitness of his own poetry (or whether he wrote The
Cobler of Caunterburie), "Chawcer sat downe and laught, and then rising vp and leaning his back against
a Tree, he made this merry aunswer."50 The
colloquy goes on for some forty-one pages, and includes Chaucer again
being called, as in The Cobler of Caunterburie, "old." Although Chaucer
loses the argument, his liveliness in Greenes Vision makes "old" seem an
affectionate epithet. When Greene accedes to Gower's injunction to
leave off writing of love, "Chawcer shakt his head and fumed."51 Then
Solomon, like a deus ex machina, appears and has the last word, enjoining
Greene to "leave all other vaine studies, and applye thy selfe to feede
upon that heauenly manna," to which the waking Greene accedes, con
cluding with "as you had the blossomes of my wanton fancies, so you shall
haue the fruit?s of my better laboures."52 While Gower's morality "wins,"
Chaucer's voice argues for tolerance. He tells Greene not to concern
himself with the ascription of the Cobler, and his tale, while lacking a
moral issue at its heart, teases authority through the comeuppance of
a jealous husband. Helen Cooper reads Greenes Vision on the worth and
morality of literature this way: "Literature may indeed be wanton; but
although its attractiveness may make it suspect, that does not in every
case necessitate a denial of its worth, its power of persuading to virtue.
The responsibility may, however, fall as much on the reader as on the
writer."53 A living father Chaucer, ostensibly bested by John Gower, makes
the more important case for readerly judgment, itself possibly a matter
of life and death under the Tudors.
In a final instance of a dramatically speaking Chaucer?Richard Brath
wait's "Chaucer's Incensed Ghost" (1617, STC 3585), a
post-Tudor poem
attached to The Smoking Ages, or, The man in the mist: with the life and death
of Tobacco?Chaucer voices his unhappiness and disgust, not only to have
"self-authorization," see Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern
England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 47, 52.
50. Brewer, The Critical Heritage, pp. 130-35, prints a fair amount of Greenes Vision, as do
Boswell and Holton.
51. Accessed through the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998- ), February 13, 2005.
52. EEBO, accessed February 13, 2005.
53. Cooper, "'This Worthy Olde Writer,'" p. 104.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
352 Bishop
been brought "o' th' stage," but at the damage "Pipe-Pageants" are
having
on his reputation:
Las; Is it fit the stories of that book,
Couche'd and compil'd in such a various forme,
Which art and nature joyntly did adorne,
On whose quaint Tales succeeding ages look,
Should now lie stifled in the steems of smoak,
As if no poet's genius could be ripe Without the influence of Pot and Pipe?54
Father Chaucer speaks to
reputation, not
regulation; genius, not morals,
in defending his tales now "subjects both for Presse and Stage."55 Not
only a
living visitor, Chaucer is father, except to "a brat hee never got,"
and requires that his audience "conceive this well." For this living father
Chaucer, stage and press equally bring his generative figure back to life.
The desire for a living Chaucer to meet the restrictions of print produces a small genre of "performing" Chaucers. The trope of a living Chaucer
uses the stage's idiom of presence56
to counteract the commodified life
lessness of print's mechanical reproduction.
The last sixteenth-century folio edition of Chaucer's Works, Speght's in
1598, provides the most powerful representations of living father Chaucer
to answer "dead" print. Speght's edition includes many more peritexts than
had its predecessors. One is a long biography, "Chaucers Life," divided
into "His Marriage," "His Education," "His Revenues," "His Rewards," "His
Children, with their advancement" (a long section), and "His Countrey."
Speght's other peritexts include a glossary of hard words, a drawing of
Chaucer's arms like that found in sixteenth-century wealthy houses' panel
portraits, and a schematic of his family tree, in Latin. Speght's printed words,
like those of Bullein, Greene, and Brathwait, animate father Chaucer.
A poetic peritextual dialogue, reminiscent of Hoccleve's, has two speak
ers, "The Reader" and "Geffrey Chaucer." Not only Chaucer but his?and
Speght's?reader speaks: a revoiced Chaucer joins
a uniquely voiced read
er.57 The poem's content
specifically adumbrates an editor's concern about
54- Included in Caroline Spurgeon, Richard Brathwait's Comment, in 1665, upon Chaucer's
Tales of the Miller and the Wife of Bath (London: Kegan Paul, 1901), pp. viii-xi.
55. Spurgeon, Richard Brathwait's Comment, p. x.
56. "Aura is tied to [an actor's] living presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura
which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth cannot be separated for the spectators from
that of the actor . . . Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast
than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to it or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction"; Benjamin, "The Work of Art," pp. 231-32.
57. Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia, "Love Among the Ruins: Response to Pech
ter," Textual Practice, 119 (1997), 69, suggest that modernity predicates "certainty on the
existence of consciousness" (p. 69). The appeal to the reader's voice as well as a revoiced
Chaucer signals this shift towards consciousness as a literary issue.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 353
book as commodity. Both Chaucer and Reader use the language of print to praise Speght for his tireless work.
Reader
Where hast thou dwelt, good Geffrey, all this while, Unknown to us, save
only by thy Books'?
Chaucer
In Haulks and Herns, God wot, and in Exile, Where none
vouchsaft to yield me Words or Looks;
Till one which saw me there, and knew my Friends, Did bring me forth: such Grace sometime God sends.
Reader
But who is he that hath thy Books repair 'd, And added more, whereby thou are more graced?
Chaucer
The self-same Man who hath no Labour spar'd To help what Time and Writers had defaced:
And made old Words, which were unknown of many, So plain, that now they may be known of any.
Reader
Well fare his heart; I love him for thy sake, Who for thy sake hath taken all this Pains.
Chaucer
Would God I knew some means amends to make, That for his Toil he might receive some Gains.
But wot ye what ? I know his Kindness such, That for my good he thinks no Pains too much.58
Chaucer's liveliness here, like his liveliness in the protodramas, comes
from his voice rather than, in Hoccleve's case, his likeness. In the high
value folio edition, however, self-conscious printers' metaphors layer the
work of editors, parents, and readers to let Chaucer's liveliness answer
print's status as
commodity.
Speght's 1602 edition includes two more poems that animate Chaucer.
Written by Francis Thynne, son of the editor William, the first poem closes
with lines attuned to the trope of a living Chaucer: "Then Chaucer live, for
still thy Verse shall live / T'unborn Poets which Life and Light will give."59
58. Transcribed from the University of Oregon's copy of Speght's edition (see n. 2). Trigg,
Congenial Souls, prints a final couplet: "And more than that; if he had knowne in time, / He
would have left no fault in prose nor rime" (p. 133). 59
Upon the Picture of Chaucer.
What Pallas City owes the heavenly mind
Of prudent Socrates, wise Greece's Glory; What Fame Arpi?as spreadingly doth find
What lasting Praise sharp witted Italy By Tasso's and by Petrark's Pen obtained;
What Fame Barias unto proud France hath gained;
By seven days World Poetically strained:
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
354 Bishop
Even more insistently, Thynne's second poem, "Of the Animadversions
upon Chaucer," uses, like the dialogue poem from the earlier Speght edition, the trope of Chaucer's living fatherhood while gesturing toward
print and editorship:
In reading of the learn'd praise-worthy Pain, The helpful Notes explaining Chaucer's Mind, The abstruse Skill, and artificial Vein;
By true Annalogy I rightly find
Speght is the Child of Chaucers fruitful Brain; Vernishing his Works with Life and Grace,
Which envious Age would otherwise deface.
Then be he lov'd and thanked for the same,
Since in his Love he hath reviv'd his Name.60
In this poem, Speght becomes the "vernisher" of Chaucer's works, coating and rubbing to warm and enliven. Both the Reader and Francis Thynne aver that Chaucer, the living father-artist, "really"
comes to life in the edi
tion of his child, Thomas Speght. Speght includes these poems of Francis
Thynne, son of William, Chaucer's first folio editor, with a conscious nod to
filial pieties, his to Chaucer and Francis's to his father. The elder Thynne's and Chaucer's entanglements with the Tudor family seem background here: Speght prints Francis's "Animadversions" as peritexts in which Francis
details his father's contretemps with Cardinal Wolsey.61 Yet Speght brings his own Tudor entanglements to bear, printing his dedicatory epistle to
Elizabeth's secretary, "Sir Robert Cecil, one of hir highnes most honvrable
privie covnsel," as first peritext in the edition. The edition's numerous
peritexts surround Chaucer with the earliest and latest Tudor history.
What high Renown is purchas'd unto Spain, Which fresh Dianaes Verses do distill; What Praise our Neighbour Scotland doth retain
By Gawine Douglas, in his Virgil Quill; Or other Motions by sweet Poets Skill; The same, and more, fair England challenge may,
By that rare Wit and Art thou do'st display In Verse, which doth Apollos Muse bewray.
Then Chaucer live, for still thy Verse shall live
T'unborn Poets which Life and Light will give. Fran. Thynn.
See Francis Thynne's Animadversions, pp. cvi-cvii. The poem appears in the University of
Oregon's edition of Speght (see n. 2 above), on a 1 verso.
60. Francis Thynne's Animadversions, p. cvii. 61. Despite Henry VIII's assurances, "my father was called in questione by the Bysshoppes,
and heaved at by cardinall Wolseye, his olde enymye, for manye causes, but mostly for that
my father had furthered Skelton to publishe his 'Collen Cloute' againste the Cardinall"; Francis Thynne's Animadversions, p. io.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 355
The most striking of Speght's new peritexts is, as in Thynne's 1532 Jesse tree illustration, a visual one. New to Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's
Works, it pictures Chaucer full length, standing in a position similar to that
of both the portrait painted in 1556 over Chaucer's Westminster tomb
and the illumination in the Hoccleve manuscript (fig. 2).62 By including both Chaucer's image and his genealogy, the image goes one step further
than Stow's Canterbury Tales title page?which Speght uses in 1598 and
rejects in 1602?to fold Chaucer into Tudor hegemony. Not only regularly
reprinted but actually pasted into copies of Stow's edition, this woodcut, or "momentous talisman," is entitled "The Progenie of Geffrey Chaucer."63
Like the engraving of Henry Vffl's lineage used to title The Canterbury Tales, this peritext layers Chaucer with Tudors. Drawn by John Speed, it portrays two families, royal and Chaucerian: Chaucer's daughter ends up, by dint
of marriage, ennobled. In contrast to the earlier woodcut, generations run down, rather than up, this illustration's sides so that John of Gaunt's
name parallels Chaucer's in a roundel atop the illustration, rather than
at its bottom.
Since the image details the entry of Chaucer's children into the no
bility, it includes, on its left-hand side, a version of the royal genealogy
depicted in the earlier woodcut. In
Speed's version, however, the gene
alogy of Henry VII, the first Tudor king, contains five female forbears,
including Henry's mother Margaret Beaufort, and nearly doubles the
number of female forbears shown in the earlier woodcut. Not only that,
but Chaucer's own family tree, on the image's right-hand side, includes
four women, including the poet's wife, making for a total of nine women,
rather than the three appearing in the earlier woodcut and, interest
ingly, in traditional images of a Jesse tree.64 In these two ways Speed's illustration provides
more space for generative women than does the
earlier woodcut?and does so in the waning years of Elizabeth's reign. The
choice to include more women may allude to an opinion,
current in the
sixteenth century, that Chaucer was particularly sympathetic
to women.65
62. Driver, "Mapping Chaucer," p. 241, infers a different portrait as Speed's source: a late
sixteenth-century portrait found in British Library, MS Additional 5141; for the image, p.
242.
63. The phrase "momentous talisman" is John R. Hetherington's, Chaucer 1532?1602, Notes and Facsimile Texts Designed to Facilitate the Identification of Defective Copies of the Black-Let
ter Folio Editions of 1532, 1542 c. 1550, 1561, 1598 and 1602 (Birmingham, England: John R. Hetherington [privately published], 1964), p. 7. The engraving is treated in Arthur M.
Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive Catalogue with Introductions, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 286-89.
64. I thank James W. Earl for this insight into the Tudor tree's imitation of religious
iconography. 65. "Excuse Chaucer . . . for he was euer god wate, all womannis freynd," from Gavin
Douglas's translation of Virgil's Aeneid (Spurgeon dates the manuscript version 1513, Boswell
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
"H .. ?1 ..__. ... i g
Figure 2. The works of
our ancient, learned, ?? excellent
English poet, feffrey Chaucer : as they have lately been
compared with the best manuscripts, and several things
added, never before in print : to which is adjoyn 'd, The
story of the siege of Thebes, by fohn Lydgate, monk of Bury :
together with the life of Chaucer, shewing his countrey,
parentage, education, marriage, children, revenues, ser
vice, reward, friends, books, death : also a table, wherein
the old and obscure words in Chaucer are explained, and
such words (which are many) that either are, by nature
or derivation, Arabick, Greek, Latine, Italian, French,
Dutch, or Saxon, mark'd with particular notes for the bet
ter understanding their original. London: n. p., 1687.
Folio 2, verso. By kind permission of James Fox,
head, special collections, Knight Library, University
of Oregon.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 357
Or it may, through a subtle analogy with Elizabeth's own
strategies, make
Chaucer the paternal vernacular poet of the mother tongue, metaphori
cally both father and mother,66 even as it represents Chaucer's fecundity and progeny. The "Progenie" illustration puts "father Chaucer" squarely into English history, mapping the familial affiliations of Chaucer, from
wife to great-great-grandson, onto royal lineage.
But this image does more. The bottom of the image shows the tomb
of the poet's son, Thomas, and his wife, Maud. Yet Chaucer stands up
right in the illustration's center atop his son and daughter-in-law's tomb,
his posture genially defying death. Making Chaucer's image central in a
full-length, authoritative portrait subtly suggests, on the model of Henry VIII?a monarch famously obsessed with progeny?Chaucer
as father.
But the roundels on the image's right side?Chaucer's line?end with
great-great-grandson Edmund De la Pole, whom Henry VIII had be
headed in 1513.67 Living father Chaucer atop his children's tomb flanked
by his extinguished line cannot help but remark on a childless queen
Elizabeth?increasingly controlling press and pamphlet?and the "liv
ing" nature of print, overcoming both commodification and censorship.
Speed says his image of Chaucer comes not from the image on Chaucer's
tomb but from Hoccleve, Chaucer's scholar.68 Speed invokes manuscript to gesture towards those once-living books, the "haulks and herns" of
the forest primeval in which manuscript Chaucer formerly resided.
But the gesture also brings to light what's lost between manuscript and
print. Speed's image, based on Hoccleve, brings manuscript life to the
printed book and living Chaucer to many readers, undoubtedly more
readers than Hoccleve's manuscripts had: it can even affect "readers"
and Holton date the printed version 1553); "Chaucer, how miscaried thy golden pen?" with a side note "Chaucer, lib. faeminarum encomion.I.& alterum, de laudib.bonarum.faeminar,"
William Heale, from An Apologie for Women (1609). Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 282, n. 14, states that "Chaucer himself stages a critique of patriarchal (and, for that matter, heterosexualist) authority in his fictions." But see also Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), for important qualifications
of this view. 66. Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), esp. pp.
16,69. 67. Pearsall, Life, p. 284. 68. See above, note 62. Speght contends that the portrait on Chaucer's tomb also comes
from the image in the Hoccleve manuscript; see Dane, Who Is Buried, p. 13: "M. Nicholas
Brigham did at his owne cost and charges erect a faire marble monument for him, with his picture, resembling that done by Occleve." Ashmole, whose Theatrum first published an
image of the tomb, credits Hoccleve's image as guide for the tomb painting's restoration, which leads Pearsall to consider Speght's peritext the restorer's real inspiration (Pearsall,
Life, p. 296). But, as Pearsall also points out, "Speght's picture [i.e., Speed's engraving] itself of course derived from the tradition of which the original tomb portrait may have been an
important early ancestor" (p. 296).
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
358 Bishop
of Chaucer's Westminster tomb. Chaucer's generative power is simulta
neously historical, literary, royal, legitimate, doubly gendered, artistic,
and living. It subtly challenges both live queen and dead print. Life and art atop the obverse face of generation?death?answers print's dead
letter. The peritext puts on one page, with image instead of the words
Bullein and Greene put in living Chaucer's mouth, a challenge to the Tudor regime of letters.
This image well deserves its epithet "a momentous talisman": although new to Speght's 1598 edition, the image was pasted into copies of Stow's
1561 edition, including one now in the Huntington library. Unlike the
previously discussed peritext of Henry's lineage, which, perhaps because of its troublesome content, was excised from reprints of Speght's edition
beginning in 1602, this second peritext continues to be printed in both the 1602 and 1687 folio Chaucers. These two reprints of Speght, nearly
a century apart, are, however, the only editions of Chaucer published in
the seventeenth century: John Urry's 1721 folio Chaucer edition replaces Speed's engraving with "a bust in oval" to depict the poet?and a portrait of Urry himself, sign of modern criticism's advent, precedes both it and the book's title page.69
Read together, Speght's three peritextual poems?the dialogue poem and the two by Francis Thynne?and Speed's engraving animate Chau cer and laud his editors, whose efforts come, not from the desire to
profit from their commodified books, but from kindness and love and
family devotion.70 But in Speght's editions, peritexts voice Chaucer and
Reader, warm Chaucer to life, and show him atop a tomb to give life to the Chaucer who appears in other printed matter. The concert of
these peritexts, late in Elizabeth's reign, enlivens and revoices father
Chaucer. Tracing Chaucer's fatherly liveliness through the sixteenth
century tracks Tudor politics' interp?n?tration with print. Speght's edi tion makes Chaucer's fatherly liveliness not
only an answer to
print's commodification but a comment?or
warning?upon print's conjuga tion with authority. Editors, engravers, and dialogists?Speght, Speed,
Bullein, Greene, Brathwait?meet multiple needs in making Gascoigne's
and the Cobler's father Chaucer live.
6g. Hind, Engraving in England, I, 287, notes the "bust in oval"; the University of Oregon's copy of Urry's Chaucer, Special Collections Rare Books PR 1850.1721, has a full-page en
graving of Urry facing the edition's title page, the bottom of which shows Chaucer's tomb.
Driver, "Mapping Chaucer," p. 239, and Dane, Who Is Buried, p. 24, both provide images of
Urry's title page. On Urry's edition, see William Alderson, Editing Chaucer, ed. Ruggiers, pp. 93-115
70. See Trigg, Congenial Souls.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 359
Images situate Chaucer as father, showing him with his progeny. Such
repetitions of Chaucer's living fatherhood reverse the "childhood" trope Lerer outlines for early print culture,71 and make Chaucer the father
rather than a child. Read in tandem with the woodcut of Henry VIII's
forebears, Speght's image hopes to evoke Chaucer's presence, his "aura,"
on the page. Such images, despite Lerer's denials, can "conjure [Chau
cer's] discerning visage" not
only over the "impersonator's shoulder," but
over the reader's.72 An aura of masculine generative power defines print
culture's Chaucer and parallels Chaucer's generative success with the
ruling families of York, Lancaster, and Tudor. Repetition of Chaucer's liv
ing fatherhood also makes visible print's new mode of "genetic relations
among texts and of textual history itself as a form of familial relations."73
Aura-making woodcuts in sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer picture
his fatherhood allied with royal authority: Chaucer's fecundity extends
from progeny to printed
text. Chaucer editions' images, powered by
royal concerns, make Chaucer not the "dead auctor" Lerer describes,74
but a living poet. The motif recurs in sixteenth-century prose and po
etry, along with Chaucer editions' images, to satisfy both national and
patriarchal desires, all framed by Chaucer's living fatherhood.
Ill
Late sixteenth-century print and theater complement each other in their
concern with legitimacy and authority, paternity, and nation.75 Theater
can take the idiom of "living" beyond that which print can accomplish
through inert picture and word.76 As far as the plays of Shakespeare are
concerned, a living, breathing Chaucer?desired by Bullein, Greene, and
Brathwait, and invoked in early Chaucer editions' peritexts?does not
appear. We get close: Chaucer's contemporary Gower acts as chorus in
Shakespeare's late romance Pericles, and the "Prologue" figure opening
The Two Noble Kinsmen repeats Chaucer's underground cry,
71. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 18.
72. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 151.
73. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 167.
74. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, p. 19.
75. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Lon don: Routledge, 1992); Gordon Williams, Shakespeare, Sex, and the Print Revolution (London:
Athlone, 1996).
76. Cf. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," pp. 231-32: "Aura is tied to presence . . . there is
indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is . . . founded
in mechanical reproduction."
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
360 Bishop
". . . O, fan
From me the witless chaff of such a writer
That blasts my bays and my fam'd works makes lighter Than Robin Hood!"77
But even here Shakespeare is absent: critics attribute this prologue to
Shakespeare's collaborator, John Fletcher.
Without a literal stage, Speght's living father Chaucer still adds a new
interpretive dimension to Chaucer's text through another feature of early
print Canterbury Tales. From Caxton through Speght, the conventional
printing of The Tale of Melibee makes that tale most fully Chaucer's own.
The pilgrim Chaucer tells two tales on the road to Canterbury, according to the Tales' frame narrative: one of Sir Thopas, and one of Melibee and his
wife Prudence. Early and modern editions treat the two tales quite differ
ently. Chaucer's name graces neither author-told tale in modern editions:
the Riverside Chaucer, like its twentieth-century predecessors edited by F. N. Robinson and E. T. Donaldson, calls the two tales told by Chaucer the poet on the pilgrimage road The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee.
Early editions, on the other hand, invariably identify Chaucer with The Tale of Melibee by calling it "The Tale of Chaucer" (they call the preced ing tale "The Rime of Sir Thopas"). The title "Tale of Chaucer" appears in tables of contents, at the beginning of the tale, and as a running header
throughout, page by page.78 Furthermore, the prose tale's difference is
further accentuated by the form of its title. The other tales' titles take their teller as a possessive, such as The Wife of Bath's Tale. In The Tale of
Chaucer, the order is reversed.79 Early print's efforts to identify tale with
77- William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Prologue, 11. 18-21.
78. Wynken de Worde's edition (STC 5085) calls the tale "The Tale of Chaucer" above the introductory woodcut, and "Chaucers Tale of Melibeus" beneath it. Running headers
on every page call it "The Tale of Chaucer." Pynson's edition (STC 5086) calls it simply "The Tale of Chaucer." Thynne's text printed by Richard Grafton for William Bonham
(STC 5069) titles the tale "Chaucers Tale of Melibeus," again with the running title "The Tale of Chaucer." These editions were consulted on EEBO. The University of Oregon copy of Stow includes this list of tales on
^ 3 r and v; the University of Oregon copy of Speght, at c 3 r. At the head of the text itself, however, the tale is titled "Chaucers Tale of Melibeus"
(Stow, folio lxxi recto; Speght, folio 125 recto). Speght continues: "Prudence, the discreet wife of Melibeus, persuadeth her husband to patience, and to receive his Enemies to mercy and grace. A Tale full of Morality, wherein both high and low may learn to govern their affections." While the header in both editions changes the title from the simple "Tale of
Chaucer," the tale's running title does not change, remaining at the top of every page "The Tale of Chaucer" and retaining the eponym, unique among the other Canterbury Tales for
carrying Chaucer's name.
79. The tale Chaucer tells of Melibee and Prudence is called, not "Chaucers Tale" (until
Urry's 1721 edition, which uses "Chaucers Tale" as its running heading), but "The Tale of Chaucer" (Tyrwhitt's 1775 quarto edition first uses "The Tale of Melibee" as consistent
title). Wynkyn de Worde (1498, STC 5085) calls Thopas, along with Melibee, a "Tale of
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 361
poet read in relation to the figure of living father Chaucer, especially in
Speed's "momentous talisman," make The Tale of Melibee into Chaucer's
authentic voice.80 The eponymous Tale of Chaucer carries the weight of
English literary history with which the sixteenth-century folio tradition
had invested the poet.81 Read in concert with living father Chaucer, the
tale so titled makes his voice speak most dramatically from the book. Such a reading makes The Tale of Melibee, with its drama of urgent counsel, a
"spokestale" for living father Chaucer.
The Tale of Melibee has inspired critical discussion that reads its ethi cal import, portrayed
as feminine eloquence meeting dangerous patriar chal wrath, alternately as brilliant and sententious.82 Prudence laboriously guides her husband, Melibee, to use
peaceful negotiation rather than
armed conflict to settle the fracas perpetrated by "thre of his olde foes."83 In her "warrishing" (1. 1277) of Melibee's "talent" (1. 1251; desire) for
Chaucer," thus making doubly apparent the Canterbury Tales frame narrative as well as a "liv
ing" Chaucer. De Worde's edition also prints identical woodcut illustrations for both "tales of Chaucer" (consulted online through EEBO; Urry's and Tyrwhitt's editions through the
courtesy of the University of Oregon Special Collections [SCA Rare Books PR 1850.1721 and PR 1866.T8 vols. 1-4]).
80. The links between these two Tales has prompted a fair amount of analysis; see espe
cially Seth Lerer, "'Now holde youre mouth': The Romance of Orality in the Thopas-Melibee Section of the Canterbury Tales," in Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, ed. Mark C. Amodio
(New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 181-205, the thesis of which?the prose nature of The Tale of Melibee signals a complexity and ethic absent from the romance poetry of The Tale of Sir Thopas?has an effect on the current essay's reading of Melibee's import.
81. Spurgeon, 500 Years, I, 114-59: Holinshed lauds Chaucer who, through his (and
Gower's) "diligent industry" has made "riche and plentifull" the "barreyne, rude, and un
perfect" language of English so that it can "expresse that which the minde conceyved" (p. 114) ; Thomas Nashe comments, "Art, like yong grasse in the spring of Chaucer's florishing,
was glade to peepe vp through any slime of corruption" (p. 136). The garden metaphor, assuredly proverbial, gestures towards foison and generation.
82. See Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval
England (Philadelphia: Penn Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 91-107, noting the tale's strong con
nection to Chaucer himself because his character tells the tale (p. 92); John Burrow, "The Third Eye of Prudence," in Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, ed. John Burrow and Ian P. Wei (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 37-48, on the tale's
popularity in the late Middle Ages (p. 45); Carolyn P. Collette, "Chaucer and the French
Tradition Revisited: Philippe de M?zi?res and the Good Wife," in Medieval Women: Text and
Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed.Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale, and Lesley Johnson (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2000), pp. 151-68, giving a new source for the tale; Daniel Kempton, "Chaucer's
Tale of Melibee: 'A Litel Thyng in Prose,'" Genre, 21(1988), 263-78, looking at the senten
tious and "domestic comedy" (p. 272); and Elizabeth Lunz, "Chaucer's Prudence as the
Ideal of the Virtuous Woman," Essays in Literature, 4 (1977), 3-10, making Prudence into a figure of advice like Lady Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation.
83. The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1987), pp. 217-39, VII, 1. 970. All subsequent references to the tale will be taken from this
edition and cited by line numbers.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
362 Bishop
vengeance, Prudence must first dispose of her husband's objections to
changing his opinion; more importantly, she mustjustify her opinion that
he particularly needs to listen to women's counsel (11. 1064-1111). Once
her "sweete wordes" (1. 1114) have convinced him to listen to her advice,
Prudence anatomizes bad decisions made through anger, covetousness,
or haste (11. 1122-36), continuing to quote innumerable authorities,
including Cassiodorus (1. 1194), Peter Alphonsus (1. 1218), and St. Paul
(1. 1291). Her advice to choose few but wise counselors (11. 1069, 1162) boils down to becoming Melibee's sole advisor (11. 1724-25). Prudence
effects Melibee's reconciliation with his enemies (11. 1815-25, 1875-88) after talking him out of a final vengeful ploy: to exile and disinherit them
(1. 1825). Prudence convinces her husband, Melibee, to value his family's
continuity over all else: to reconcile with his enemies, to make peace:
"Wherefore I pray you, lat mercy been in youre herte, / to th'effect and entente that God Almighty have mercy on yow in his laste juggement" (11.
1867-68). Melibee accedes to Prudence's plea against vengeance and, by
preventing war, insures his family's continuity.
Chaucer's authenticity and voice, joined in The Tale of Chaucer, thus
identify Chaucer with a female rhetor, Melibee's wife, Prudence.84 More
importantly, Chaucer's voice in his tale identifies his attitude with the tale's
pacifist theme. The tale's animated, authentic rhetoric rings with truth
aimed at monarchs. Moreover, to identify Chaucer with the female Pru
dence?to complicate gender?more fully condemns patriarchal wrath
and laments its negative effect on the entire polity. An animated Chaucer
telling this tale, in the context of peritexts and protodramas that bring artistic and literal generation alive, bespeaks authenticityjoined
to a paci
fist ethic. To identify Chaucer with Prudence, who speaks truth to power in service to her daughter, ambivalently genders Chaucer's fatherly living
voice to contest authoritarian rulership and its increased censorship of
print and art.
Yet, once he accepts Prudence's counsel, Melibee's closing words argue
for mercy and forgiveness:
Wherfore I receyve yow to my grace / and foryeve yow outrely alle the of
fenses, injuries, and wronges that ye have doon agayn me and myne, / to
this effect and to this ende, that God of his endelees mercy / wole at the
tyme of oure diynge foryeven us oure glites that we han trespassed to hym
84. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 212-46, draws a parallel between the
literary Prudence and the historical Anne of Bohemia, wife to Richard II. In Wallace's ac
count, Prudence's reconciliatory strategies match Anne's in their desire to advise vengeful husbands. Thus a fictional character adumbrates a historical one, noting both desire, and
failure, to mollify masculine wrath.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Father Chaucer and the Vivification of Print 363
in this wrecched world. / For doutelees, if we be sory and repentant of the
synnes and giltes which we had trespassed in the sighte of oure Lord God,
/ he is so free and so merciable / that he wole foyeven us oure giltes / and
bryngen us to the blisse that nevere hath ende. (11. 1882-88)
Melibee accedes to Prudence's?Chaucer's?counsel. Speght's edition
of Chaucer, especially the Speed woodcut, constructs Chaucer's voice to
sound this urgent plea. The message of reconciliation works as far as the
Tudor/Stuart antipathy is concerned, but it does little to shift the regime of censorship and authoritarianism to which Chaucer's readers have be
come inured in the course of the sixteenth century. Indeed, the second
run of Speght's edition in 1602, while it retains the "momentous talisman,"
drops the engraving that pictures the Tudor dynasty's family pedigree. Even Chaucer himself retires: only twice, in 1602 and 1687, is Speght's folio edition, or any complete Chaucer, printed in the seventeenth cen
tury. The folio canon continues in 1721, its purpose much changed to
celebrate a dead poet whose tomb the title page pictures. As John Hines has noted, modernity trades on opposition between the
material world and the realm of language and ideas.85 Sixteenth-century
folio editions of Chaucer, fully immersed in Tudor politics, help to create
this antipathy, but even in their culminating moment?Speght's edition of
1598, with Speed's momentous talisman?Speght invests his author with
fatherhood and life to combat not only the commodification of print but
the creeping seduction of authoritarianism, enemy of art. Living Chaucer
loses the fight, his pacifist tale renamed, his tomb the frontispiece for
Urry's eighteenth-century folio edition of his works?modernity's answer
to Speed's living father Chaucer.86
85. Hi?es, Voices in the Past, p. 138. 86.1 am pleased to acknowledge the great help I have received in revising this essay from
Martha Driver, Lisa Freinkel, and Kathryn Lynch; and from Lori Newcomb, one of the
readers for JEGP.
This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:32:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions